★★ Clouds that had seemed to
be lightening and separating condensed instead into a darkish
gray mass with a strong wind blowing under it, and still no leaves
to break it. The school dropoff was late enough and cold enough to
discourage the commute. Through the windows by the couch, the
brightness arrived at last, till for a while clouds were thin
and white, spread out against the blue. Then solid-looking puffs of
cumulus arrived, and began clumping and darkening. The afternoon
wind had not changed its essential character from the morning, but
in the light—and before the vicinity of the river—it could be
taken as invigorating. The children were inspired to run in it.
“The sky looks like paint, Dad!” the three-year-old
announced in the later afternoon, looking out at new
formations of blue and white. “The clouds!” The sun, when it
lowered, executed at least a double bank shot to
blaze from the northeast corner of the apartment towers. Now
the clouds were purple, edged with rose gold, and then plain
purple, against a lemon sky.

A staff member at one major UK publisher described the
[reduction] in engagement as a ‘Faceboocalypse’, and said that his
team had noticed “a change to news feed algorithm which drastically
reduced the reach of many news sites’ posts”. The Huffington Post
also acknowledged that they had seen a fall-off in Facebook
engagement in recent weeks.

NewsWhip’s data team noticed the reduction when analysing data
for the biggest Facebook sites of February 2015. A wide range of
top publishers, including BuzzFeed, the New York Times, Fox News
and more seem to have been affected.

The 100 most shared English language stories (which include
quizzes and other viral content) on Facebook in February had just
over 10.2 million combined engagements, compared to over 16.4
million for the same set in January.

This report from NewsWhip suggests that the consequences of
Facebook favoring posts that don’t link readers away from
Facebook (it’s sort of obvious when you say it like that!) are
already being felt.

NewsWhip’s monthly rankings of most-shared sites used to be a
little more exciting and surreal—early last year, a Viral Nova or
an Independent Journal Review would just materialize out of
nowhere, displacing, say, a USA Today. They have remained, month to
month, reliably valuable for understanding what seems to be going
on in the fetid content
trenches (Contrenches). It is good to know, for example/I
guess, that the top external site on Facebook is a publication composed almost entirely
of quizzes. Anyway, something weird started happening late last
year.

For all of their remarkable qualities, newsletters can be very
boring, because they are, by definition, rote enterprises. They
change so little. This is why the current Awl management has
largely forsaken them in favor of the dynamic world of
Periscopekatting. But then there is Laura Olin’s Everything
Changes. It changes a lot. Weekly, even. The format, the
concept, the tone, the frequency—everything changes. But constant
mutation is just one of the many reasons we love Laura’s
newsletter: It’s slightly weird, super sharp, comfortably personal,
not a little amusing, and, perhaps most important of all, it’s very
brief, and never boring. These are all qualities that line up
extraordinarily well with the Awl’s editorial vision.

A few weeks ago, Emma got in touch with me to say that she wanted to
write about the new Semiotext(e) book I’m
Very Into You but she wasn’t entirely sure what she wanted
to say. At the time, I had just finished reading the book for the
second time and had four different Word documents open, each with
their own failed attempt to write even just a small thing about
I’m Very Into You, about the way Kathy Acker and McKenzie
Wark had almost accidentally written the entire story of their
relationship through email, saying almost nothing about what
transpired between them but almost everything else: television,
books, magazines, travel, motorcycles, distance, space, work,
sex.

We decided that instead of staying locked inside our own heads
we would try to write to each other about why this very small book
was something we couldn’t stop thinking about. Weirdly, in the
process we found ourselves somewhat unconsciously mimicking the
trajectory of Acker and Wark’s correspondence, something that
probably says more about email as a medium than it does about
either relationship. Emma and I accidentally bumped into each other
halfway through this process and while we were standing in our
mutual friend’s kitchen, surrounded by other people having their
own conversations, she called it the “Universal Grammar of the
Romantic Email.” I think that sums it up perfectly. Below are our
emails.

March 18, 2015from: Haley Mlotek
to: Emma Healey
Emma: hi!! I was so happy to get your email last night, because
first I was away and you’ve been away and we keep missing each
other, and I’ve really wanted to talk to you for awhile about a lot
of different things. And when we realized we were reading the same
book and we were both trying to write about it and were both
struggling with what we wanted to say I thought that this was the
perfect time for us to talk about, I guess, all of the above.

For context: the book I’m referring to is I’m Very Into
You, a collection of email correspondence between Kathy Acker
and McKenzie Wark from 1995 to 1996. They met and hooked up when
Kathy was in Australia and then emailed each other frequently,
eventually spending another weekend together in New York, before
the communications faded.

I read this book in, like, a minute; and then I went back and I
read it again, and I’m kind of on my third re-read now, although
I’m really just going back to Matias Venieger’s intro and certain
select passages, thinking a lot about how much I enjoy the book and
how hypocritical I am for said enjoyment.

How do you feel about reading the emails and journals
of deceased writers? I’m fairly evenly split when I consider the
concept objectively—I’d say 49% guilty, 51% put it in my eyes
immediately I need to know all the secrets—but I know I’m a
hypocrite because I already have a standing deal with multiple
people to burn my laptop and all my notebooks should I ever die,
heavy emphasis on “should.” I have sought out all my most
trustworthy friends and husbands and had them swear to me that they
would never, ever publish my emails, journals, or heaven forbid, my
tweets; future generations have done nothing to deserve that
garbage.

I am, probably for the exact same reasons, so drawn to books and
collections that do what I’m most afraid of: share writing that was
never supposed to be shared.

For as long as I’ve been
required to file, I’ve been lying about my taxes.

Before anyone sics the IRS on me, let me clarify that I have not
been lying on my tax returns: I am a law-abiding citizen with a
deep-seated fear of the audit. But I have been lying to friends and
colleagues—minor, reflexive lies summoned forth to hide the fact
that I am a secretly wealthy 20-something.

During my childhood, an envelope of stock certificates with my
name on it would appear under the tree every Christmas among the
toys. My incredibly generous grandmother was slowly disbursing the
stock that she had inherited from her mother to her 10
grandchildren while she was still alive—presumably for estate
planning purposes. This pattern continued until she ran out in my
late teens, at which point I had amassed a solid chunk. The
resulting dividend income, which I dutifully deposited into my
savings account four times per year, meant that I started filing a
tax return before I could legally drive.

And then came my first tax-related lie: One day when I was a
freshman in high school, my father made a passing comment about
taxes in front of a friend of mine, who promptly asked me what on
earth I was paying taxes on. I stammered an awkward reply about
having done some part-time work for a relative last summer, and we
moved on.

“When you’re a kid, you think you’ll be a certain place in your
mid-30s. I presumed I’d be rich because when you’re middle-class
with hardworking immigrant parents that’s the whole point. I also
thought I’d be married and potentially own a beautiful apartment in
New York. Ha ha. What you spend zero time wondering about is whether
you’ll still be doing drugs. You naturally assume you’ll grow
out of whatever stupidity you dabbled in as a teen. Even up to my
20s I didn’t realize that job-having, non-fuckup grown-ups in their
30s and 40s still smoked weed. Or did ecstasy. But then I got older
and got bored.”#

The end of March is still a dead zone for produce here in the
Northeast, but in Mexico and further south to Peru, one of the
world’s most diverse and most popular fruits, the mango, is
beginning to enter one of its two seasons (the other is in early
fall). Even though our neighbor to the south is one of the world’s
biggest producers of mangoes—and Florida grows a pretty respectable
number and hosts what looks like
a delightful festival focused on the fruit—the mango is
underappreciated and underused in the United States. This should be
a crime! We should all be arrested!

If you live in a place without a substantial Indian or Mexican
population, there’s a pretty fair chance the only mango you’ve ever
seen is the Tommy Atkins: a large, red-green mango with a giant pit
and a fibrous interior that gets stuck in your teeth. The Tommy
Atkins is one of those accursed fruit varieties, like the Red
Delicious apple, that is an insult to its brothers and should be
banished from the planet. The Tommy Atkins is the worst possible
example of the wonders of the mango: weak in flavor, egregious in
texture, and popular exclusively because it is large, easy to grow,
and tough enough to withstand transit.

The Tommy Atkins mango was created by Thomas Atkins in Broward
County, Florida from a tree planted in 1922. Atkins was very
pleased with his shit mango; he thought it would sell well because
it is large and pretty and does not bruise easily. He was right,
although it took awhile for the variety to catch on. Throughout the
early nineteen fifties, Atkins kept trying to get the Florida Mango
Forum to approve it;
they did not, citing its subpar flavor and texture, but
eventually the growers, rather than the tasters, won out. The Tommy
Atkins today is by far the most common variety in the U.S., which
is embarrassing as heck.

There are thousands of varieties of mangoes, ranging from giant
grapefruit-sized mangoes to tiny plum-sized mangoes, dark purple
mangoes to delicate golden mangoes, and flat oblong mangoes to
nearly spherical mangoes. The textures range from so creamy you
need to use a spoon to so crunchy you need to use a fork (or
chopsticks), the flavors from crisp and vegetal to heavy and sweet.
Most mango varieties do not travel well, unfortunately, and there’s
not much of a market in shipping some of the weirder ones all the
way from, say, the south of India, where mangoes are as beloved as
apples in New York. That said, if you live in a city, or in a place
with a healthy representation of certain immigrant groups, there’s
a pretty good chance you can find a mango that’ll totally change
the way you think about them.

★★★ The thermometer on the
glass of the kitchen door said 32 degrees when the seven-year-old
got boosted up to read it. Shining ice lay in the
junction where the tributary country road curved to meet the
marginally larger stem road. More ice sat in the flooded parts of
the stubbled fields, which were colorless as the leafless trees
between them. The lump in the top of the
three-year-old’s hat contained his gloves; his hands,
clutching their palm fronds, were cold. The daffodils in the bed
alongside the stone church were drooping over. Back by the house–39
degrees now—squirrels dug through the seed hulls scattered below
the bird feeders, in front of the bed of snowdrops. Nuthatches and
titmice and chickadees came and went, and goldfinches the color of
parchment. A Cooper’s hawk, twitching balefully, commandeered a low
branch for a minute, then flew off toward the garage with or
without something clutched in one foot. The little
birds resumed their feeding. The sun falling through
the near-closed blinds made the water in the toilet shine like a
lamp in the dimness. Forty-six degrees after lunch, at car-loading
time. Everything in the drab length of New Jersey was sharp-drawn
and distinct, save only the firm new roadway dissolving ahead into
a mirage of sky and car paint. Vultures were as abundant as
Turnpike exits, naked heads visible at 70 miles an hour, give or
take. There was nothing remotely resembling a cloud; a light
haze was salient by default. The bulge of the gibbous moon
seemed to grow fatter as it came into focus. Trees and balconies
gleamed in the city. The layer of dust on the unwashed apartment
windows was coppery in the sunset.